like a lot of other people here, I am trying to find out the best settings for my individual profile. After encoding about 200 of my DVDs with xmedia recode I found finally found handbrake and must say.. THANK YOU developers!! There is one major thing that made me switch and this is support for chapter makers and more than 2 AC3 language tracks. So now back to the topic. I did try out a couple of settings with one chapter of "along came polly". I My goal is high quality, close to 1:1 of the dvd. Space is second, encoding time does not matter.
The first thing wich borders me is the strict/loose settings. I did read the guide and know the difference. However I could still not make up my mind as I do not know how "loose" setting will perform on future equipment like for example on an atom/ion setting. Right now I tend to strict as the endsize is not much different and the quality must be the same, right?
The second thing is cr over average bit rate setting. After reading the guide I am almost convinced to use this setting as I want to have quality over size.
The third thing is the quality setting. I tried 18, 19, 20 (size: 29, 25, 21 MByte files). I am leaning towards qf 18 which is equivalent for this section of the movie with 2000 avbr. I also tried 2200, and 2400 avgbr (32, 35 MByte files).

So what do you guys think? Of course space does matter, but not that much. I have a 1,5TB drive here and I believe that in 2 years by the time it is full there will be a 4,5TB drive out there which will simply replace it. So I would rather go with a future proove quality setting and a file size that I can handle now. I tend to Qf18 strict.

For playback on a computer (like Atom/Ion), loose or strict doesn't matter. If you're not doing any cropping, strict is fine. Otherwise you're better off with loose. Unless your playback device doesn't support anamorphic, in which case you can't use either.

Can you see a difference between the RF18 and RF19 clips (while watching them, not zoomed in 400% on a still, since that's now how you're going to experience them)?

Average bitrate comparisons are uninteresting. 2000 @ RF18 for this movie/chapter, 1200 for another movie, 3500 for another movie.

My suggestion is RF19/loose.

OTOH as you note, disk is really cheap; I just bought 2TB HDs at $140/ea. Even with your multiple audio tracks, it's less than 50 cents to keep a 7GB movie. Keep the rip, reencode as necessary for the device/codec du jour.

Thank you for your reply. I think I am going to try out RF19 now. Although I could tell a slightly difference on the screen without zoom ( I am running a projector on an estimated 3m diagonal), the size difference is to big. I will try RF19 loose. Why did you recommend loose over strict? I don't do any croping.

Concerning the disc. I now bought a 1.5TB for about 100 Euro. This is cheap, however - I connected it to my fritzbox WLAN as a media drive. That only offers one USB port, plus the drive takes about 9Watt in operation and 3 Watt while sleeping. Adding another drive would double that and might force me to find another NAS for serving as the box is limited to one drive. I would say the 1.5TB have to be enough for 3 years. I am also swithing to blue ray rips.. so size does matter in the end It is limited.

These are fairly high-quality settings, definitely not super fast (I average at most 15 fps on a pretty nice iMac). Compression is pretty good considering the 17.5 RF, depending on what you want 18 or 19 is probably fine. 17.5 is borderline overkill, you basically would never want an RF lower than 17. My goal was to get as close to DVD-level as possible in hopes that I will never rip these again (or if I do it will be many years down the road when computers are much faster and encoding has made even greater leaps-and-bounds in quality/file size ratios).

Gotta have a good rip if you're running a 1080p 50" TV... (well ok, I'm only on a 42" 720, but it's getting upgraded soon). And my 2 TB hard drive is almost 2/3rds full already... crazy how quick storage can vanish with video. But hey to each their own (Heck I'd probably increase even more settings if I had one of those new beastly Core i7 iMacs)